Saturday, February 11, 2012

E-Learning Generations

In recent years I have been working on two major concepts:
first, the connectivist theory of online learning, which views learning as a
network process; and second, the massive open online course, or MOOC, which is
an instantiation of that process. These, however, represent only the most
recent of what can be seen as a series of 'generations' of e-learning. In this
talk I describe these generations and discuss how they led to, and are a part
of, the most recent work in online learning.--Thank you for welcoming me to your conference.

The theme I would like to explore today concerns the growth
and development of our idea of online learning, or as it is sometimes called,
e-learning. What I would like to do is to describe a series of 'generations' of
technologies and approaches that have characterized the development of online
learning over the years. These generations of have informed the shape of online
learning as it exists today, and will help us understand something of the
direction it will take in the future.

These generations span more than a 20-year period. Indeed,
there may even be described a 'generation zero' that predates even my own
involvement in online learning. This generation is characterized by systems such
as Plato, and represents the very idea of placing learning content online. This
includes not only text but also images, audio, video and animations. It also
represents, to a degree, the idea of programmed learning. This is the idea that
computers can present us with content and activities in a sequence determined
by our choices and by the results of online interactions, such as tests and
quizzes. We have never wandered far from this foundational idea, not even in
the 21st century. And it continues to be the point of departure for all
subsequent developments in the field of online learning.

For me, 'generation one' consists of the idea of the
network itself. My first work in the field of online learning was to set up a
bulletin board system, called Athabaska BBS, in order to allow students from
across the province to communicate with me online. It was also the time I first
began using email, the time I began using the Usenet bulletin Board system, and
the time I first began using online information systems such as Gopher. The
process of connecting was involved and complex, requiring the use of modems and
special software.

As generation one developed, generation zero matured. The
personal computer became a tool anyone could use to create and store their own
content. Commercial software came into existence, including both operating
systems and application programs such as spreadsheets, word processors, and
database tools. Content could be created in novel ways - the 'mail merge'
program, for example, would allow you to print the same letter multiple times,
but each with a different name and address drawn from a database.

The next generation takes place in the early 1990s and is
essentially the application of computer games to online learning. These games
were in the first instance text-based and very simple. But they brought with
them some radical changes to the idea of learning itself.

One key development was the idea that multiple people could
occupy the same online 'space' and communicate and interact with each other.
This development coincided with the creation of IRC - inter-relay chat - and
meant that you were in real time communication with multiple people around the
world. But more: the gaming environment meant you could do things with other
people - explore terrain, solve puzzles, even fight with them.

Another key idea was the design of the gaming space itself.
Early computer games (and many early arcade games) were designed like
programmed learning: they were like a flow chart, guiding you through a series
of choices to a predetermined conclusion. But the online games were much more
open-ended. Players interacted with the environment, but the outcome was not
predetermined. At first it was created by chance, as in the rolling of dice in
a Dungeons and Dragons game. But eventually every game state was unique, and it
was no longer possible to memorize the correct sequence of steps to a
successful outcome.

The third element was the technology developed to enable
that which we today call object oriented programming. This changed the nature
of a computer program from a single entity that processed data to a collection
of independent entities - objects - that interacted with each other: they could
send messages to each other to prompt responses, one could be 'contained' in
another, or one could be 'part' of another. So a game player would be an
object, a monster would be an object, they would be contained in a 'room' that
was also an object, and gameplay consisted of the interactions of these objects
with each other in an unplanned open-ended way.

During the development of this second generation we saw the
consolidation of computer-based software and content, and the commercialization
of the network itself. The many brands we saw in the 80s - Atari, Amiga, Tandy,
IBM, and many more - coalesced into the now familiar Mac-PC divide. A few major
software developers emerged, companies like Microsoft and Corel. Computers
became mainstream, and became important business (and learning) tools.

Meanwhile, the world of networks began to commercialize.
Commercial bulletin board services emerged, such as Prodigy, AOL, GEnie and
Compuserv. And the first local internet service providers came into being.
Networking became the way important people connected, and communities like the
WELL began to define a new generation of thought leaders.

You can begin to see a pattern developing here. Through the
first three generations, a familiar process of innovation occurs: first the
development and piloting of the technology (which is also when the open source
community springs up around it), then the commercialization of the technology,
then the consolidation of that commercial market as large players eliminate
weaker competitors.

The next generation sees the development of the content
management system, and in learning, the learning management system.

Both of these are applications developed in order to apply
the functionality developed in generation zero - content production and
management - to the platform developed in generation one - the world wide web.
The first content management systems were exactly like mail merge, except
instead of printing out the content, they delivered it to the remote user
(inside a computer program, the commands are exactly the same - 'print' is used
to print data to a page, print data to a file, or print data to the network).

Early learning management systems were very easy to define.
They consisted of a set of documents which could be merged with a list of
registered users for delivery. They also supported some of the major functions
of networks: bulletin boards, where these users could post messages to each
other, chat rooms, where they could occupy the same online space together, and
online quizzes and activities, where they could interact with the documents and
other resources.

It is interesting to me to reflect that the major debates
about online learning around this time centered on whether online learning
would be mostly about online content - that is, reflective of generation zero -
or mostly about online interaction - that is, reflective of generation one. I
remember some teachers in Manitoba swearing by the interaction model, and using
a bulletin-board style application called FirstClass - eschewing to more
content-based approach I was favouring at the time.

Learning management systems drew a great deal from distance
learning. Indeed, online was (and is still) seen as nothing more than a special
type of distance learning. As such, they favoured a content-based approached,
with interaction following secondarily. And a very standard model emerged:
present objectives, present content, discuss, test. More advanced systems
attempted to replicate the programmed learning paradigm. The Holy Grail of the
day was adaptive learning - a system which would test you (or pretest you) to
determine your skill level, then deliver content and activities appropriate to
that level.

Despite its now-apparent shortcomings, the learning
management system brought some important developments to the field.

First, they brought the idea that learning content could be
modularized, or 'chunked'. This enabled a more fine-grained presentation of
learning content than traditional sources such as textbooks and university
courses. Shorter-form learning content is almost ubiquitous today.

Second, it created the idea that these content modules or
chunks were sharable. The idea that books or courses could be broken down into
smaller chunks suggested to people that these chunks could be created in one
context and reused in another context.

And third, they brought together the idea of communication
and content in the same online environment. The learning management system
became a place where these smaller content objects could be presented, and then
discussed by groups of people either in a discussion board or in a live chat.

These were the core elements of learning management
technology, and a generation of online learning research and development
centered around how content should be created, managed and discussed in online
learning environments. People discussed whether this form of learning could be
equal to classroom learning, they discussed the methodology for producing these
chunks, and they discussed the nature, role and importance of inline
interaction.

Around this time as well an ambitious program began in an
effort to apply some of the generation two principles to learning management
systems (and to content management in general). We came to know this effort
under the heading of 'learning objects'. In Canada we had something called the
East-West project, which was an attempt to standardize learning resources. The
United States developed IMS, and eventually SCORM. Most of the work focused on
the development of metadata, to support discoverability and sharing, but the
core of the program was an attempt to introduce second generation technology -
interactive objects - to learning and content management.

But it didn't take hold. To this day, the learning
management system is designed essentially to present content and support
discussion and activities around that content. We can understand why when we
look at the development of the previous generations of online learning.

By the time learning management systems were developed,
operating systems and application programs, along with the content they
supported, were enterprise software. Corporations and institutions supported
massive centralized distributions. An entire college or university would
standardize on, say, Windows 3.1 (and very few on anything else). 'Content'
became synonymous with 'documents' and these documents - not something fuzzy
like 'objects' - were what would be created and published and shared.

The network was by this time well into the process of
becoming consolidated. Completely gone was the system of individual bulletin
board services; everything now belonged to one giant network. Telecoms and
large service providers such as AOL were coming to dominate access. The
internet standardized around a document presentation format - HTML - and was
defined in terms of websites and pages, constituting essentially a simplified
version of the content produced by enterprise software. The same vendors that
sold these tools - companies like Microsoft and Adobe - sold web production and
viewing tools.

Probably the most interesting developments of all at the
time were happening outside the LMS environment entirely. The tools used to
support online gaming were by this time becoming commercialized. It is worth
mentioning a few of these. New forms of games were being developed and entire
genres - strategy games, for example, sports games, and first-person shooters -
became widely popular.

Though gaming remained a largely offline activity, online
environments were also beginning to develop. One of the first 3D multi-user
environments, for example, was Alpha Worlds. This was followed by Second Life,
which for a while was widely popular. Online gaming communities also became
popular, such as the chess, backgammon and card playing sites set up by Yahoo.
And of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention online gambling sites.

As I mentioned, these developments took place outside the
LMS market. The best efforts of developers to incorporate aspects of gaming -
from object oriented learning design to simulations and gaming environments to
multi-user interactions - were of limited utility in learning management
systems. LMSs were firmly entrenched in the world of content production, and to
a lesser extent the world of networked communication.

This leads us next to the fourth generation, paradoxically
called web 2.0 - and in the field of online learning, e-learning 2.0.

The core ideas of web 2.0 almost defy description in
previous terminology. But two major phenomena describe web 2.0 - first, the
rise of social networks, and second, the creation of content and services that
can interact with those networks. Web 2.0 is sometimes described as the 'web as
a platform' but it is probably more accurate to see it as networking being
applied to data (or perhaps data being applied to networking).

The core technology of web 2.0 is social software. We are
most familiar with social software through brand names like Friendster,
MySpace, Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, and most recently, Google+. But if we
think for a moment about what social software is, it is essentially the
migration of some of your personal data - like your mailing list - to a content
management system on the web. These systems then leverage that data to create
networks. So you can now do things online - like send the same message to many
friends - that you could previously only do with specialized applications.

E-learning 2.0 is the same idea applied to e-learning
content. I am widely regarded as one of the developers of e-learning 2.0, but
this is only because I recognized that a major objective of such technologies
as learning objects and SCORM was to treat learning resources as data. The idea
was that each individual would have available online the same sort of content
authoring and distribution capabilities previously available only to major
publishers. And these would be provided online.

E-learning 2.0 brings several important developments to the
table.First, it brings in the idea of the social graph, which is
essentially the list of people you send content to, and the list of people who
send you content, and everyone else's list, all in one big table. The social
graph defines a massive communications network in which people, rather than
computers, are the interconnected nodes.

Second, it brings in the idea of personal publishing. The
beginning of web 2.0 is arguably the development of blogging software, which
allowed people to easily create web content for the first time. But it's also
Twitter, which made creating microcontent even easier, and YouTube, which
allowed people to publish videos, and MySpace, which did the same for music,
and Facebook and Flickr, which did the same for photos.

Third, it brings in the idea of interoperability, first in
the form of syndication formats such as RSS, which allow us to share our
content easily with each other, but also later in the form or application
programming interfaces, which allow one computer program on one website to
communicate with another program on another website. These allow you to use one
application - your social network platform, for example - to use another
application - play a game, edit content, or talk to each other.

And fourth, it brings us the idea of platform-independence.
Web 2.0 is as much about mobile computing as it is about social software. It is
as much about using your telephone to post status updates or upload photos as
it is about putting your phonebook on a website. Maybe even more so.

What made web 2.0 possible? In a certain sense, it was the
maturation of generation 0, web content and applications. After being
developed, commercialized and consolidated, these became enterprise services.
But as enterprises became global, these two become global, and emerged out of
the enterprise to become cloud and mobile contents and applications.

Some of the major social networking sites are actually
cloud storage sites - YouTube and Flickr are the most obvious examples. Some
are less obvious, but become so when you think about it - Wikipedia, for
example. Other cloud storage sites operate behind the scenes, like Internet
Archive and Amazon Web Services. And there are cloud services, like Akamai,
that never reach the mainstream perception.

These cloud services developed as a result of enterprise
networking. On the research side, high-speed backbones such as Internet 2 in
the U.S. and CA*Net 3 in Canada virtually eliminated network lag even for large
data files, audio and video. Similar capacities were being developed for lease
by the commercial sector. And the now-consolidated consumer market now began to
support always-on broadband capacity through ASDL or cable internet services.

The consolidation of core gaming technologies took place
largely behind the scenes. This era sees the ascendance of object-oriented
coding languages such as Java and dot Net. The open-ended online environment
led to massive multiplayer online games such as Eve and World of Warcraft. In
learning we see the emergence of major simulation developers such as CAE and
conferencing systems such as Connect, Elluminate, and Cisco. These have become
dominant in the delivery of online seminars and classes.

Content management services, meanwhile, were increasingly
commercialized. We saw the emergence of Blackboard and WebCT, and on the
commercial side products like Saba and Docent. Google purchased Blogger, Yahoo
purchased Flickr, and even the world of open source systems came to be
dominated by quasi-commercial enterprises. Innovators moved on and began to try
radical new technologies like RSS and AJAX, Twitter and Technorati. Today we
think of social networking in terms of the giants, but when it started in the
mid-2000s the technology was uncertain and evolving. In education, probably the
major player from this era was Elgg, at that time and still to this day a novel
technology.

Today, of course, social networking is ubiquitous. The
major technologies have been commercialized and are moving rapidly toward
commodification and enterprise adoption. The ubiquity of social networking came
about as a result of the commercialization of content management services. A
new business model has emerged in which providers sell information about their
users to marketing agencies. The proliferation of social networking sites has
now been reduced to a few major competitors, notably YouTube, Facebook and
Twitter. The providers of search and document management services - Yahoo,
Microsoft, Apple and Google - have their own social networks, but these are
also-rans. Hence when people speak of 'social network learning' they often mean
'using Facebook to support learning' or some such thing.

This is the beginning of the sixth generation, a generation
characterized by commercialized web 2.0 services, a consolidation of the
CMS/LMS market, the development of enterprise conferencing and simulation
technology, cloud networking and - at last - open content and open operating
systems.

Now before the Linux advocates lynch me, let me say that,
yes, there have always been open operating systems. But - frankly - until
recently they have always been the domain of innovators, enthusiasts and hobbyists.
Not mainstream - not, say, running underlying major commercial brands, the way
Linux now underlies Apple's OSX, and not widely used, say, the way Android
powers a large percentage of mobile phones.

So that's the history of online learning through five
generations, but it is also a listing of the major technologies that form the
foundation for sixth-generation e-learning, which I would characterized by the
Massive Open Online Course.

Let me spend a few moments talking about the development of
the MOOC model.

When George Siemens and I created the first MOOC in 2008 we
were not setting out to create a MOOC. So the form was not something we
designed and implemented, at least, not explicitly so. But we had very clear
ideas of where we wanted to go, and I would argue that it was those clear ideas
that led to the definition of the MOOC as it exists today.

There were two major influences. One was the beginning of
open online courses. We had both seen them in operation in the past, and had
most recently been influenced by Alec Couros's online graduate course and David
Wiley's wiki-based course. What made these courses important was that they
invoked the idea of including outsiders into university courses in some way.
The course was no longer bounded by the institution.The other major influence was the emergence of massive
online conferences. George had run a major conference on Connectivism, in which
I was a participant. This was just the latest in a series of such conferences.
Again, what made the format work was that the conference was open. And it was
the success of the conference that made it worth considering a longer and more
involved enterprise.

We set up Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008
(CCK08) as a credit course in Manitoba's Certificate in Adult Education (CAE),
offered by the University of Manitoba. It was a bit of Old Home Week for me, as
Manitoba's first-ever online course was also offered through the CAE program,
Introduction to Instruction, designed by Conrad Albertson and myself, and
offered by Shirley Chapman.

What made CCK08 different was that we both decided at the
outset that it would be designed along explicitly connectivist lines, whatever
those were. Which was great in theory, but then we began almost immediately to
accommodate the demands of a formal course offered by a traditional
institution. The course would have a start date and an end date, and a series
of dates in between, which would constitute a course schedule. Students would
be able to sign up for credit, but if they did, they would have assignments
that would be marked (by George; I had no interest in marking).

But beyond that, the course was non-traditional. Because
when you make a claim like the central claim of connectivism, that the
knowledge is found in the connections between people with each other and that
learning is the development and traversal of those connections, then you can't
just offer a body of content in an LMS and call it a course. Had we simply
presented the 'theory of connectivism' as a body of content to be learned by
participants, we would have undercut the central thesis of connectivism.

This seems to entail offering a course without content -
how do you offer a course without content? The answer is that the course is not
without content, but rather, that the content does not define the course. That
there is no core of content that everyone must learn does not entail that there
is zero content. Quite the opposite. It entails that there is a surplus of
content. When you don't select a certain set of canonical contents, everything
becomes potential content, and as we saw in practice, we ended up with a lot of
content.

Running the course over fourteen weeks, with each week
devoted to a different topic, actually helped us out. Rather than constrain us,
it allowed us to mitigate to some degree the effects an undifferentiated
torrent of content would produce. It allowed us to say to ourselves that we'll
look at 'this' first and 'that' later. It was a minimal structure, but one that
seemed to be a minimal requirement for any sort of coherence at all.Even so, as it was, participants complained that there was
too much information. This led to the articulation of exactly what connectivism
meant in a networked information environment, and resulted in the definition of
a key feature of MOOCs. Learning in a MOOC, we advised, is in the first
instance a matter of learning how to select content.

By navigating the content environment, and selecting content
that is relevant to your own personal preferences and context, you are creating
an individual view or perspective. So you are first creating connections
between contents with each other and with your own background and experience.
And working with content in a connectivist course does not involve learning or
remembering the content. Rather, it is to engage in a process of creation and
sharing. Each person in the course, speaking from his or her unique
perspective, participates in a conversation that brings these perspectives
together.Why not learn content? Why not assemble a body of
information that people would know in common? The particular circumstances of
CCK08 make the answer clear, but we can also see how it generalizes. In the
case of CCK08, there is no core body of knowledge. Connectivism is a theory in
development (many argued that it isn't even a theory), and the development of
connective knowledge even more so. We were hesitant to teach people something
definitive when even we did not know what that would be.

Even more importantly, identifying and highlighting some
core principles of connectivism would undermine what it was we thought
connectivism was. It's not a simple set of principles or equations you apply
mechanically to obtain a result. Sure, there are primitive elements - the
component of a connection, for example - but you move very quickly into a realm
where any articulation of the theory, any abstraction of the principles,
distorts it. The fuzzy reality is what we want to teach, but you can't teach
that merely by assembling content and having people remember it.

So in order to teach connectivism, we found it necessary
for people to immerse themselves in a connectivist teaching environment. The
content itself could have been anything - we have since run courses in critical
literacies, learning analytics, and personal learning environments. The content
is the material that we work with, that forms the creative clay we use to
communicate with each other as we develop the actual learning, the finely
grained and nuanced understanding of learning in a network environment that
develops as a result of our working within a networked environment.

In order to support this aspect of the learning, we decided
to make the course as much of a network as possible, and therefore, as little
like an ordered, structured and centralized presentation as possible. Drawing
on work we'd done previously, we set up a system whereby people would use their
own environments, whatever they were, and make connections between each other
(and each other's content) in these environments.

To do this, we encouraged each person to create his or her
own online presence; these would be their nodes in the course networks. We
collected RSS feeds from these and aggregated them into a single thread, which
became the course newsletter. We emphasized further that this thread was only
one of any number of possible ways of looking at the course contents, and we
encouraged participants to connect in any other way they deemed appropriate.This part of the course was a significant success. Of the
2200 people who signed up for CCK08, 170 of them created their own blogs, the
feeds of which were aggregated with a tool I created, called gRSShopper, and
the contents delivered by email to a total of 1870 subscribers (this number
remained constant for the duration of the course). Students also participated
in a Moodle discussion forum, in a Google Groups forum, in three separate
Second Life communities, and in other ways we didn't know about.

The idea was that in addition to gaining experience making
connections between people and ideas, participants were making connections
between different systems and places. What we wanted people to experience was
that connectivism functions not as a cognitive theory - not as a theory about
how ideas are created and transmitted - but as a theory describing how we live
and grow together. We learn, in connectivism, not by acquiring knowledge as
though it were so many bricks or puzzle pieces, but by becoming the sort of
person we want to be.

In this, in the offering of a course such as CCK08, and in
the offering of various courses after, and in the experience of other people
offering courses as varied as MobiMOOC and ds106 and eduMOOC, we see directly
the growth of individuals into the theory (which they take and mold in their
own way) as well as the growth of the community of connected technologies,
individuals and ideas. And it is in what we learn in this way that the
challenge to more traditional theories becomes evident.

Now I mentioned previously that the MOOC represents a new
generation of e-learning. To understand what that means we need to understand
what the MOOC is drawing from the previous generations, and what the MOOC
brings that is new.

Let me review:Generation 0 brings us the idea of documents and other
learning content, created and managed using application programs. In this the
sixth generation of such technologies we have finally emerged into the world of
widespread free and open online documents and application programs. The ability
to read and write educational content, to record audio and make video, is now
open to everybody, and we leverage this in the MOOC. But this is not what makes
the MOOC new.

Additionally, a fundamental underlying feature of a
connectivist course is the network, which by now is in the process of becoming
a cloud service. WiFi is not quite ubiquitous, mobile telephony is not quite
broadband, but we are close enough to both that we are connected to each other
on an ongoing basis. The MOOC leverages the network, and increasingly depends
on ubiquitous access, but this is not what makes the MOOC new.

The MOOC as we have designed it also makes use of
enterprise 'game' technology, most specifically the conferencing system.
Elluminate has been a staple in our courses. We have also used - and may well
use again in the future - environments such as Second Life. Some other courses,
such as the Stanford AI course, have leveraged simulations and interactive
systems. Others, like ds106, emphasize multimedia. Using these and other
immersive technologies, the MOOC will become more and more like a personal
learning environment, but this is not what makes the MOOC unique.

The MOOC also makes explicit use of content management systems.
The early MOOCs used Moodle; today we encourage participants to use personal
content management systems such as WordPress and Blogger. The gRSShopper
environment itself is to a large degree a content management system, managing a
large store of user contributions and facilitator resources. But clearly, the
element of content management is not what makes the MOOC new.

And the MOOC makes a lot of use of commercial social
networking services. Twitter feeds and the Facebook group are major elements of
the course. Many students use microblogging services like Posterous and Tumblr.
Like membership in a social network, membership in the course constitutes
participation in a large graph; contents from this graph are aggregated and
redistributed using social networking channels and syndication technologies.
But many courses make use of social networks. So that is not what makes a MOOC
unique.

So what's new? I would like to suggest that the MOOC adds
two major elements to the mix, and that it is these elements that bear the most
investigation and exploration.First, the MOOC brings the idea of distributed technology
to the mix. In its simplest expression, we could say that activities do not
take place in one central location, but rather, are distributed across a large
network of individual sites and services. The MOOC is not 'located' at
cck12.mooc.ca (or at least, it's not intended to me) - that is just one nexus
of connected sites.In fact, it is the ideaofdistributed knowledgethat is introducedby theMOOCagain, andthe meansof learning isreally involvedwiththis
idea. When youlearnas a network, you cannot teachonefact after another.
Each fact is implicated with the others.You cannotseeasinglefact, even if youextracta fact from the data, because it would beonlyoneabstraction, anidealization, andnotmoretrue thatthe identification ofregularitiesin the data-andlearning becomes morelikeaprocesstocreatelandforms, and
less likeanexercise ofmemory. It
is theprocess
of pattern recognition that we want to develop, andnot the remembering of facts.

Accordingly, the second element the MOOC brings to the mix
revolves around the theory of effective networks. More deeply, the MOOC
represents the instantiation of four major principles of effective distributed
systems. These principles are, briefly, autonomy, diversity, openness and
interactivity.

For example, it is based on these principles that we say
that it is better to obtain many points of view than one. It is based on these
principles that we say that the knowledge of a collection of people is greater
than just the sum of each person’s knowledge. It is based on these principles
that we argue for the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, for open education,
for self-determination and personal empowerment.

These four principles form the essence of the design of the
network - the reason, for example, we encourage participants to use their
preferred technology (it would be a lot easier if everybody used WordPress).

We are just now as a community beginning to understand what
it means to say this. Consider 'learning analytics', for example, which is an
attempt to learn about the learning process by examining a large body of data.

What is learned in the process of learning analytics is not
what is contained in individual bits of data - that would be ridiculous - but
overall trends or patterns. What is learned, in other words, emerges from the
data. The things we are learning today are very simple. In the future we expect
to learn things that are rather more subtle and enlightening.

Let me now say a few words in closing about Generation 6
and beyond.

From my perspective, the first three generations of
e-learning (and the web generally) represent a focus on documents, while the
second three represent a focus on data. Sometimes people speak of the second
set as a focus on the Semantic Web, and they would not be wrong. Data does not
stand alone, the way documents do; the representation of any object is
connected to the representation of any number of other objects, through shared
features or properties, or by being related by some action or third party
agency.

Indeed, if the first three generations are contents,
networks and objects respectively, the second three generations are those very
same things thought of as data: the CMS is content thought of as data, web 2.0
is the network thought of as data, and the MOOC is the environment thought of
as data. So what comes after data is pretty important, but I would say, it is
also to a certain degree knowable, because it will have something to do with
content, the network, and the environment.

Here's what I think it will be - indeed, here's what I've
always thought it would be. The next three generations of web and learning
technology will be based on the idea of flow.

Flow is what happens when your content and your data
becomes unmanageable. Flow is what happens when all you can do is watch it as
it goes by - it is too massive to store, it is too detailed to comprehend. Flow
is when we cease to think of things like contents and communications and even
people and environments as things and start thinking of them as (for lack of a
better word) media - like the water in a river, like the electricity in our
pipes, like the air in the sky.

The first of these things that flow will be the outputs of
learning (and other) analytics; they will be the distillation of the massive
amounts of data, presented to us from various viewpoints and perspectives,
always changing, always adapting, always fluid.

Inside the gRSShopper system I am working toward the
development of the first sort of engines that capture and display this flow.
gRSShopper creates a graph of all links, all interactions, all communications.
I don't know what to do with it yet, but I think that the idea of comprehending
the interactions between these distributed systems in a learning network is an
important first step to understanding what is learned, how it is learned, and
why it is learned. And with that, perhaps, we can take our understanding of
online learning a step further.

6 comments:

Having ridden the generations you so aptly define as a teacher who came to e-learning in the pre-WWW days, it is great to read your summary of the transitions. From bulletin board days when my then 12 year-old[now professional Computer QA guy 31-year-old] set up my first classroom connection on a pre-286-IBM I knew education was about to undergo a major paradigm shift (or struggle to make sense of the one happening in the world beyond it). Thank you for summarizing it so well.

Thanks for your insides about the history of online learning. Currently, I am an online student. I really enjoy the flexibility of studying online, but I definitely need to be careful balancing my social life, work, andeducation. This is my second year and I feel that I have learn more studying by myself than before when I had to drive to school.

I am a student at VIU university, part of the second cohort of teachers learning about taking the craft on-line. Your article is very informative and affirms my thinking that the applications of technology are increasing in ways that are too expansive to consider alone. Collectivism, as you describe it, makes sense and feels necessary. I am curious about your comments at the end of the article. You mention that you have all this data and you didn't know what to do with it but that was a year and half ago. Where are you now with this data? What have you learned from monitoring these connections?